Chicago’s Racist Cops and Racist Courts

Demonstrators protested after the Chicago Police Department released a video showing the killing of Laquan McDonald last November.CreditJoshua Lott for The New York Times

AS a report by a panel commissioned by Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago found on Wednesday, racism in the city’s Police Department is rampant: Blacks are disproportionately subjected to traffic stops, Tasers and street stops that do not lead to arrest; they also account for an appalling 74 percent of the 404 people shot by the Chicago police between 2008 and 2015.

What the report does not say, though — and what many Chicagoans themselves may not know — is that the rottenness is not confined to the Police Department. Racist practices extend far into the criminal courts, indeed they are the very foundation of the cases that enter into the court system. The hands of many judges and prosecutors are just as dirty as the bigots in blue.

I know this firsthand. In 1997, I became a court clerk in the prosecutor’s office for Cook County, which encompasses Chicago. Many of my days started with my supervisors’ corralling police officers who were scheduled to testify.

The officers, in plain clothes, would walk into the office with a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, as if they were walking into a men’s bathroom rather than an office. Often, they would sit in the jury box, next to the judge (regardless of the appearance of impropriety) and would dutifully teach me how the justice system really worked, how black men really were “dogs,” and how judges and prosecutors who focused on due process “nonsense” were “liberals” who were throwing away “their” cases.

Prosecutors and judges often participated in this culture. They spoke in overtly racist ways in court, mocked defendant’s black-sounding names or used bastardized Ebonics to imitate the voices of defendants, families and victims. In their eyes, defendants were to blame for their poverty, an ideology that justified a host of abuses of defendants, victims, witnesses or anyone with black or brown skin who found themselves in the court.

What I realized was that attorneys were nearly as well versed in the Chicago Police Department’s brand of street justice as they were in the criminal code. And they knew that to blow the whistle or in any way resist this culture could cost you your reputation, your job or, even, your safety.

A judge I often worked with gave me my first lesson in criminal law, Cook County-style. He didn’t refer to the criminal code or even the Constitution. He taught me the Chicago Police Department’s brand of case acquisition. He said to watch for a string of cases where officers would reproduce the same police report detailing how drugs would “fall out” of defendants’ pockets as they “fled on foot” — common phrases used by police officers. The judge said that a “certain” neighborhood (which was code for black and Latino) had an epidemic of “holey” pockets.

The judge laughed at the fabrication of police reports as if it were a novelty, rather than an abuse of power. Never once did the judge try to teach me about the Fourth Amendment and whether such police practices fell within the boundaries of lawful search and seizure.

I spent years researching the Cook County court system for a book, including scores of interviews with prosecutors and judges. Their stories lined up closely with my own experience. “A police officer killed a guy and they said he was shooting at them at the time,” one prosecutor told me. “I could tell that didn’t make much sense, but I put the blinders on.” When the prosecutor brought up inconsistencies in two officers’ stories to a supervisor, the boss screamed, “You’re a prosecutor, not a defense attorney!” and assigned a new lawyer to the case.

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In my interviews with judges and prosecutors, they willingly admitted that police perjury was part of the culture of the court system in Cook County. Twenty of the 27 judges I interviewed said that police perjury occurred, six did not directly respond, and only one said that it did not occur. As for prosecutors, 12 of 27 prosecutors said that police perjury sometimes occurred, seven did not directly respond and eight said that it did not.

What was unclear from these interviews was whether the silence or denial was based on an unwillingness to talk, or on a fear of talking. From my experience, it was rooted in fear. Prosecutors need the police. They are their star witnesses. They need cops to win cases, and they need to win cases to get promoted. This dependency creates a system where the police have a hand in controlling the types of prosecutors who get promoted, and the type of justice defendants receive in our courts.

Some apologists claim that these types of racist practices, and the codes of silence that are required to perpetuate them, are the unsavory but necessary facts of life in maintaining law and order in the big city. That is simply not true. They have dire consequences for the rights and liberties of those least capable of protecting them.